Decoded: Inside Cisco’s 3 big bets in India Inc’s favor

CIsco is using every partnership and talent to tap into Indian IT industry’s top priorities for the near future. Read on to know Cisco President Sameer Garde’s big bets.Vaishnavi J Desai | ETCIO | Updated: August 21, 2019, 12:58 IST

If change is the order of the day, technology is the biggest adherer to it. And in keeping with the dynamism, tech giants are exploring the areas that would balance business needs, yet assure RoI. Cisco--the network solution giant transitioning into a software-heavy company --has been divulging into newer markets and verticals.

Cisco India is willing to place its bets on three major areas: AI for proactive security measures, employee engagement and multi cloud, says Sameer Garde, President-India and SAARC for Cisco.

AI in security: Time for proactive measures

Worldwide spending on artificial intelligence (AI) systems is forecast to reach $35.8 billion in 2019, an increase of 44.0% over the amount spent in 2018, predicts IDC. Makes for a valid point as CIOs and CISOs today are struggling to find the point of data breach: patient zero.

Garde believes that that the need of the hour is to provide end-to-end solutions which not only covers the entire threat intelligence spectrum but also offers faster post-attack recovery. “With an increase in surface area attacks, enterprises and technology companies will use AI and ML to build stronger threat protection solutions,” he says. But the power of AI and ML is distributed equally amongst the attacker and the organization which is being threatened. “Hence, we believe that the threat is real, and in our opinion, security is probably the biggest bet,” he says.

Multi-cloud: The next big battle

The next big war after security for Cisco to tackle would be multi-cloud. 69% of enterprises will have multi-cloud/hybrid IT environments by 2019, according to 451 Research. Partnerships, therefore, will be critical for the San-Jose headquartered company, and the latest in the series being TCS.

The biggest advantage for Cisco is to get the policy automation or cloud orchestration piece, and network analytics, all integrated into one solution and with the network. Garde in his interaction with the industry have found customers previously been aggressive on the public-cloud journey over the last five years and are now moving back to a private plus public cloud network. On the other hand, he has witnessed customers in the banking sector that resisted moving to the public cloud and are now aggressively pursuing it. “We, therefore, think that this multi-cloud piece will be our next big bet, including security,” he opines.Employee engagement

Furthermore, as the IT industry witnesses traction and momentum in the employee experience, Cisco wants to tap into it. “A lot of our team members spend 75% of their time in meetings. We are witnessing phenomenal energy in the areas focused on improving the employee experience. This is not just limited to large enterprises like Cognizant, which use approximately 1.2 billion minutes of voice and audio, video and audio on WebEx but also a lot of SMB customers are adopting to this technology,”he opines.

Mining the manufacturing vertical

IDC says retail, banking, Discrete manufacturing, healthcare providers, and process manufacturing will be the top five industries for AI systems spending this year. A couple of years ago, Cisco’s top 100 customers were enterprises in Banking, IT and ITES and the core completed with government and service providers.

“While investing in India, we looked at some of the things which were driving GDP, and the investments which were made by the government and private sector. The number one segment which came up after our analysis was the manufacturing sector. Within this sector, there were several verticals like farming, distilleries, auto and commodities, which became the horizon one of the verticals we wanted to go after,”says Garde.

But entry into the new vertical was wrought with challenges like multiple competitors and the varied needs of customers, who weren’t evolved buyers. “Therefore, we decided to build a separate sub-vertical, only for manufacturing at the beginning of the year. We decided to make a strategy in the middle of last year and put a team at the end of the year. This year, we have laid our entire focus on these 30-40 manufacturing accounts, which resulted in a 35% business growth in that vertical,” he says.

Free wifi: Precursor for newer markets and smart city

At the recently concluded Cisco India Summit, the company announced plans to roll out free high-speed Wi-Fi zones across India with gStation. Cisco will work with Google’s gStation platform to provide access to a free, open, high-quality public Wi-Fi.

According to a TRAI report, globally there is 1 WiFi hotspot for every 150 people, and in India, 8 million additional hotspots must be installed to achieve the same ratio, creating new market opportunities for infrastructure providers and internet service providers. India has only 52,000 Wi-Fi hotspots today, necessitating a proactive strategy to make high-speed Wi-Fi hotspots ubiquitous across the country.

Public Wi-Fi also provides an opportunity to develop a broader connectivity ecosystem, which can not only benefit users and wireless ISPs but also telecom service providers, handset manufacturers, and venue owners. It has evolved as a complementary network for traffic offload purposes — offloading from congested cellular networks on to lower-cost-per-bit Wi-Fi networks extending the coverage of mobile networks within buildings and other public spots. According to the Cisco VNI report, nearly 59 percent of Internet traffic will be offloaded from cellular networks to Wi-Fi by 2022.

Would the free wifi initiative be a precursor or support function to the smart city initiative plans by Cisco? “IoT leads our smart city initiatives, and Wi-Fi is one part of it. Our other responsibilities include human-centric use cases such as providing solutions for waste disposal, parking management, traffic management and video surveillance to improve governance. We think all these services are a lot more citizen-centric, in a much broader use case portfolio than just Wi-Fi. Access is one part of it, but smart city is much more vital,” concludes Sameer Garde.

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After PSU banks, the government is likely to infuse capital in two chronically ill telecom PSUs BSNL and MTNL, and the Union Cabinet is likely to take a decision on 4G spectrum allocation to them by the third week of the current month after DoT places the note before it for consideration.

At a high-level meeting at the PMO late Tuesday, it was also decided that the two telcos will frame a Voluntary Retirement Scheme (VRS) to reduce their employee strength, which will be followed by a reduction in the retirement age to 58.